When comparing Gulp vs Sublimerge, the Slant community recommends Gulp for most people. In the question“What are the best plugins for Sublime Text?”Gulp is ranked 22nd while Sublimerge is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Gulp is:

Any task can be set to have other tasks as dependencies. The dependencies are specified through piping streams, and tasks run concurrently if they do not block in dependencies.

Pros

Pro

Allows creating task dependencies

Any task can be set to have other tasks as dependencies. The dependencies are specified through piping streams, and tasks run concurrently if they do not block in dependencies.

Pro

Streaming build system makes it easier to apply code transformations

In gulp, it's easy to pipe multiple steps together which you commonly need with build systems. For example, you may need to compile the javascript source files, then package them together, and then minify it. The streaming system makes this much easier.

Additionally, it improves performance since all operations are done in memory (compared to I/O operations) and avoids the need of unnecessarily compiling files (compared to Grunt that has to compile all files even if just one has changed).

Pro

Large plugin ecosystem

Currently gulp offers a selection of 1000+ plugins and it is growing rapidly.

Pro

Focuses on code instead of configuration

This depends on your style, but gulp is closer to the code, the actual execution isn't hidden by multiple layers and it's much easier to customize the build system without writing bloated modules. This also brings rather small configuration files.

Pro

Chaining API that's simple and elegant

In Gulp, the transforms are performed through chains which makes it easier to understand the order of operations, and easier to modify it.

Pro

Concurrency allows for high-speed perfomance

Because streams in Gulp use pipes to establish dependency order, they are parallel by default without having to rely on plugins or hacks.

Pro

Minimizes disk operations for improved performance

Because Gulp is built using streams, it can store intermediate transformations in memory and defer writing to disk until the very end. This improves performance by not requiring expensive blocking disk operations for task dependencies.

Pro

The configuration file is easily readable

Gulp's configuration file is actually very readable because it's actual JavaScript instead of a large file of JSON objects. The entry barrier is very low for developers who have never used a task runner before and it's API is very simple, with only 4 methods.

Pro

Gulp modules are usable without Gulp

Because Gulp is built on top of the streaming API, you don't actually need gulp to use them. This could be helpful if you want to re-use those modules outside of gulp, possibly for testing, and using the same modules would be more consistent.

Pro

Gulp tasks run from terminal

Pro

It is possible to use projects that use streams without plugins

Since Gulp just uses streams at its core, you don't actually need a plugin wrapper to use a project that uses streams. If you use this approach, the you don't even have to worry about plugin maintenance at all, and get the bleeding edge updates as soon as they come out even if the plugin hasn't been updated. It also means if a project happens to not have a plugin, you don't need to write a new one, you can just use it as is.

Pro

Three-way diff allows easy merging of files

Pro

Highlights intraline changes

Pro

Built-in support for Git, Subversion and Mercurial commands

Sublimerge automatically integrates with your version control history, and lets you compare between revisions, branches, remotes, and the staging area.

Pro

Can compare to clipboard contents

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Cons

Con

You need to know some limitations that are not very intuitive

There are some features in Gulp which may not be very intuitive, or that otherwise should have been the default features instead of having to implement them through arguments. For example, to keep the correct folder structure when you are copying a file, you have to add {base: "lib/"} as an argument.

Con

Rapidly changing API

While it's good that the gulp maintainers want the api to be as good as possible, it comes at the expense of stability. The upcoming gulp 4.0 release has another update to the way dependency management works which will require everyone to update their build scripts.

It also makes it hard to look up information on best practices as the best practices keep changing, making a lot of the blog posts and questions about gulp out of date.

Con

No incremental building

Con

Not suited for big and complex apps.

Writing gulpfile for complex app which consists of many source types is very cumbersome and flawy process. You'll know when you want to move to webpack.

Con

It's NOT Open Source

You can't fix or, implement nothing. And when the developer abandons the project you will be left in the lurch.

Con

It's not free

Nither as free price nor as free in freedom.

Con

Cannot compare text within the same file

Sublimerge can only compare entire file diffs, but not two selections within a file. Comparing within files can be useful for example, by refactoring two similar functions to use a shared function. With Sublimerge, you need to copy the sections into two new temporary tabs and compare between the two. This can be cumbersome, as if you have another untitled file, you won't be able to know which one is which.

Con

No version control integration

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